Schizophrenia has never before served as the narrator of the Spanish Transition. The current Spain and the past one, full of minstrels, martyrs, satyrs and traitors, last night found in Albert Boadella the perfect jester who outlined with his words a sketch of the country and made, in a scathing way, a review of the comedian profession using his agitated life with Els Joglars as a background.

In fact, we are lying: Albert Boadella was not just a jester, but two. The current director of Teatros del Canal in Madrid brought to El Salinero the two personalities that live within his body. The child and the old artist. The indomitable and the civic. The histrionic and the reflective. The ‘Boadella’ and the ‘Albert’ coexist in the same body and they did it too, almost two hours onstage, with the public of Lanzarote.

The themes played in “El sermón del bufón” were multiple. From political impropriety to the, in vogue, comic goodness, through the ways of attacking censorship and religion up to a speech on the nature of beauty. All explained using anecdotes supported by the projection of images of his years as director of Els Joglars.

One of those anecdotes deserves special attention. In 1977, the company premiered the play “La Torna”, written by Boadella himself. In it, a group of judges sentence a man to death while they get drunk and eat paella. This representation went down in history for having suffered a court-martial in the middle of the transition to democracy. For it Albert Boadella was arrested and imprisoned but then he devised a plan that could have been another play of Els Joglars.

Boadella would ask his girlfriend to draw blood and give it to his lawyer. He would pass it in one of his visits. Boadella would ingest it and vomit it in front of the guards. These, alarmed, would take him to the hospital. Once there he would gain the trust of the guardians so at least they would let him go to the bathroom alone. On the day of the court-martial, his girlfriend would bring him clean clothes in a bag with double bottom, where she would hide a medical gown and false mustache and wig. He would go to the bathroom and disguise himself. He would escape through the window and then, through the cornice of a fourth floor, he would reach the small window of another room. He would go out the door telling the patients that they would make it, that everything would be fine. He would leave the hospital, wait a month in a safe house and then flee to France. The plan, actually, worked.

The Boadella of the present focused his efforts on trying to explain to the public what art is, in his opinion: “Art should be beautiful if not, it is not art, it should have music and poetry, and you should not need a critic to explain it to you. A painting by Dalí or the 9th by Beethoven does not need an explanation, you will go to see a Pollock painting because someone tells you that it is worth millions of dollars”, he summarized.

“El sermón del bufón” is the direct and real story of a transgressor reconverted to an artist, where Boadella expresses his thoughts and fears, representing authentic situations of his own life. Without ever losing his sense of humor, Boadella made the foundations of El Salinero shake with his torrent of visceral sarcasm.